It’s summertime, and the living is…utter freaking chaos. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say the failure of drains to work properly has established itself as a cliffs-notes-obvious theme. 

The most obvious failure of actual, literal drains to … drain, during the moderated Carolina monsoons of late, left me calling management (i.e. Dad) to come help me figure out what to do about the (comparatively minor) flooding I found upon arriving home ready to head off to bed. On my birthday. Instead, I took pictures and packed up essentials while he mopped carpet, and have been living and working out of my parents’ guest room-slash-mom’s-craft-room ever since. Good news, I’m getting new floors! They’re pretty. I’ll show you when they’re here. And I’m living on them. (I’m not yet. I’m living in my parents’ guest-room-slash-craft-room right now. Oh, I mentioned that?)

Sorry for assuming you somehow knocked over your water bowl, Coop. I know there’s no way your bowl would ever hold that much water, but given my karma lately, I kind of couldn’t figure out how this latest mini-drama couldn’t be my fault somehow, and that was all I could think of that had to do with water. I hate the loudness of running water to have left a tap on.

All the while, my attempts at a measured and reasonable purging of all the things (some call it overbuying, I call it patriotism) were thwarted early on by the shroom-like growth of not one but two kidney stones, and have been continuously stunted by my body’s “drains’” failure to cooperate with modern technology and allow the bajillion lasers focused on my back for half an hour -designed to blast the stones to sand – to do anything more than split the biggn’ in three. We’re on week six now, and my neatly parsed closets and file drawers and kitchen cabinets are merely the stuff of the freaky dreams I’m having thanks to the painkillers I’m taking.

Oh! and speaking of blasts.  The impending, permanent arrival of a new resident in this here wee, unincorporated zip code, a blast from (I thought, mostly) my past who happens to be just about *the* last person I with whom I would wish to share a post office and lone supercenter, has cast a pall of anxiety over my psyche (and digestive system, previously steady hands, and child-like circadian rhythm…) relentless enough to render me 20 pounds lighter, but so cheesecake-thick and constant that I forget it’s not normal until I slip out from under it for a few hours of deep sleep, creative focus, or good eats.

So…excuses, excuses, I know, but when you sit shaking, hiccup-y and raccoon-eyed across from your doctor, insisting that “I know it doesn’t look like it right now, but all things considered, I’m doing great!” – and she not only agrees, she emphatically says “You’re doing fantastic – you are one resilient young lady!” – you actually get a gold star for putting your vomit-all-the-thoughts-and-feelings (to be saved by the govmint ‘n google for posterity) place on the back burner until you can collect them into something a little less dramatic than “I MUST PACK ALL MY THINGS AND RUN AWAY NOW! I HAVE FRIENDS ON THE WEST COAST!”.

And believe me. The “Look what I wore today!” and “Isn’t my dog cute?” and “Hey! Pasta is delicious!” posts I wrote in the meantime were so terrible on their own merit (I mean, I went directly to my “recycle bin” and made sure they were irrecoverably GONE gone, not just “windows gone”), and also burnout-tee transparently “I’M DROWNING AND ALL I KNOW HOW TO DO IS COOK AND WEAR PRETTY THINGS AND SLEEP A LOT!” that you either would have never come back, called the police to come check on me, or both.

But you would have been able to do so while eating some mighty delicious, summer quinoa, and for delaying that, I apologize.

But not enough to keep you from waiting one more day for it.